Staff Augmentation: On-demand app experts for your teams

If you follow us on social media and read our blog, you’ll see that we work on a lot of app projects from start to finish — from ideation and strategy, through design and development, to launch and beyond.

But a lot of our clients also use our staff augmentation services. That is, they add our talented app designers and developers to their own internal teams for varying lengths of time to augment their staff and deliver their projects faster.

What staff augmentation looks like in practice

Staff augmentation usually starts when our clients say something like, “I already have a mobile team, but I need more staff for a limited period of time. Can ArcTouch do that?”

The answer is absolutely, yes. Whether you need some iOS app developers for two months, a designer for six months, or a Xamarin consultant for two weeks, we’re here to help scale your existing teams and accelerate your product delivery plans. We’re currently helping more than 10 active clients with this on-demand model.

While staff augmentation may start with one ArcTouch team member, it’s not limited to one (in fact, most of our staff augmentation clients have multiple ArcTouch team members). We can augment teams with engineers, designers, QA testers, and product managers. Every engagement is tailored to your specific business goal and can last as long as needed. You can even choose whether our team members work at your location or in our offices.

Why not hire someone full time?

Hiring a full-time employee is great, but it’s also time consuming. It takes weeks to recruit, vet and train staff. In fact, according to Glassdoor, the average timeline for hiring a full-time employee takes 23 days. And that doesn’t include onboarding and training time.

With staff augmentation, all of the team members deployed on projects are ArcTouch employees who have already gone through our rigorous hiring process. We provide skilled and experienced staff members who are ready to hit the ground running so that you don’t lose valuable project days. That means your team doesn’t have to deal with recruiting or vetting talent — they can start coding and designing apps on day one.

Hiring is also expensive, especially technology workers. According to Codementor, the average cost of employing a full-time developer is an additional 76 percent of an employee’s salary. These costs include things like training, health insurance, paid time-off, retirement benefits, equipment, office space, etc. If you add in the costs of recruiting great talent along with the time it takes to get that talent on board, then it makes sense in many cases to leverage temporary talent through our staff augmentation services.

So, when does it make sense to hire a full-time employee? When you know that you need staff long term. If you know that you’ll need mobile designers or developers for years to come, hiring a full-time employee makes sense. But it’s an investment. You may not see the return from that investment until months after the need arises.

5 reasons to try staff augmentation

Over the last 10 years, we’ve worked with many clients to augment their teams based on very different needs. Here are five common reasons that companies have signed up for our staff augmentation services.

1. You want to accelerate your growth

A Fortune 500 retail client originally brought on three members of the ArcTouch team to help with a small project being managed internally. When that project grew into a much bigger effort with an aggressive schedule, the client asked us for additional resources to accelerate the project timeline. Through our staff augmentation services we were able to offer an additional nine team members, with different specialized skills to support the project. The client was able to keep the project moving forward, despite the increased scope, without disruption.

2. You need to fill a void after team member turnover

A few of our clients have lost team members for various reasons during the course of a project. While they searched for permanent replacements, they were able to leverage our team members to fill the void. We’ve also helped our clients perform interviews and find the right talent for permanent positions — along with providing training and knowledge transfer once they came on board.

3. Your short-term needs change

As mobile app development projects gather velocity, it’s common for schedules to deviate because of unknowns. Recently, we had a client that was planning a simultaneous launch of apps for both iOS and Android. But the Android app, with some unforeseen challenges, had fallen behind by a few weeks. We easily were able to add more on-demand Android engineering talent to accelerate development — and get the project back on track. Staff augmentation allows you to increase or decrease the team you need with relative ease — and you only get billed for the time you use.

4. Your junior team members need training and mentoring

Most people assume that our team only provides hands-on coding and designing. For many of our clients, we also augment your team in a consulting capacity to help define processes and to provide training on best practices in app design and development. A great example of that is our Xamarin Accelerator Program (XAP). With XAP projects, we help team members learn Xamarin best practices, while also helping with design and engineering. After these project end, the client teams are better prepared to manage and grow the applications with their own internal staff.

We also understand the importance of agile methodology and it’s common for our teams to bring their understanding of process and structure to a project. The end result is a faster, more agile approach to project management. In the case of one high-profile EdTech client, our team provides more than just engineering and design. We share our agile development tips, and even host lunch and learns to discuss new methods and technology.

5. You need specialized expertise, but not a full-time ‘person’

As technologies evolve, we know that it can be difficult to keep up with the entire ecosystem of mobile technologies (though subscribing to our monthly newsletter can help). Our team of more than 250 engineers, designers and mobile strategists have a diverse skill set and are always learning new technologies. If a problem comes up during the course of a project that an internal team can’t resolve, you don’t need another person. You need an answer — and chances are that someone on our team has it. With over 10 years experience and more than 500 completed projects behind us, you can be sure there’s no technical challenge we haven’t seen and solved already. When you work with anyone at ArcTouch, you have the institutional knowledge and the passion of the entire company behind them.

Want to learn more about our staff augmentation services?

So, are you ready to scale your team and accelerate your product plans? Contact us today to learn more about our staff augmentation options.